Traveler, Scholar, Political Adventurer: A Transylvanian Baron at the Birth of Albanian Independence: The memoirs of Franz Nopcsa

Introduction

vii Introduction The Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baron Franz Nopcsa (1877–1933), was one of the most adventuresome travelers and scholars of southeastern Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. Together with the inveterate English traveler and author Edith Durham (1863– 1944), whom he speaks of as an old friend, he brought Albania and the Albanians to the attention of the Western world. It would be no exaggeration to state that he knew the country and its people better than any foreigner of his day. Baron Nopcsa not only has a well-deserved place in Albanian studies, he was also a palaeontologist of renown and a noted geologist of the Balkan Peninsula. Franz Nopcsa (pronounced Frants Nopcha) traveled to the Balkans and in particular to Albania at a fascinating time. The peoples of southeastern Europe had long struggled to attain their autonomy and national independence from the decaying Ottoman Empire, the so-called sick man of the Bosphorus. Last among them were the Albanians. The Albanian national movement arose sluggishly in the second half of the nineteenth century, initially as a struggle for more autonomy within the Empire. By the early years of the twentieth century, the movement, in essence a series of armed uprisings against taxation and conscription, found itself caught up in wider events. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 brought the Empire to its knees and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 then engendered the definitive demise of Turkey-in-Europe. Nopcsa traveled extensively in the southern Balkans in the final years of Ottoman rule and was present during many of the cataclysms it underwent. Leaving a comfortable existence in imperial Vienna, he took up residence in the northern Albanian town of Shkodra (Scutari) where he lived from 1905–1914, and which he used as a base for his arduous journeys into the remotest and wildest region of Europe—the northern Albanian mountains. Franz (Ferenc) Nopcsa of Felső-szilvás was born in Deva, now in Romania , on 3 May 1877, as the son of a family of Hungarian aristocrats that viii Traveler, Scholar, Political Adventurer owned a family estate at Szacsal (Săcel) near Hátszeg (Haţeg) in Transylvania . He was able to finish his early education at the Theresianum secondary school in Vienna with the support of his uncle and godfather, Franz von Nopcsa (1815–1904), who was headmaster at the court of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837–1898). Nopcsa quickly developed into a talented scholar. On 21 July 1899, at the age of twenty two, he held his first lecture at the Academy of Sciences in Vienna on Dinossaurierreste in Siebenbürgen (Dinosaur remnants in Transylvania) and attracted much attention with it. Nopcsa is considered one of the founders of palaeophysiology, in particular because of his internationally renowned studies on reptile fossils. He was one of the first to make hypotheses about the physiology and behaviour of dinosaurs. Well known, for instance, was his idea of the running proavis, that is, that birds evolved from ground-dwelling dinosaurs when they developed wings to run faster. He suggested that at least some reptiles of the Mesozoic era were warm-blooded, a view that is now generally accepted. He also focused on the significance of a number of endocrine processes, which he considered to have had a major influence on the evolution and on the extinction of dinosaurs. Not all of his theories were accepted at the time, but they did succeed in advancing and stimulating discourse in many branches of palaeontology. Also of significance were Nopcsa’s achievements in the field of geology , an example of which was his research into the tectonic structures of the western Balkan mountain ranges, where he defended some rather controversial theories. During the Annexation Crisis of 1908–1909 when Austria-Hungary announced that it was annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nopcsa and the Austro-Hungarian consul general in Shkodra, August Ritter von Kral (1869–1953) were leading figures in the preparation of a military plot against Serbia and Montenegro, known as the Albania Action. Fluctuations in Austro-Hungarian policies towards Albania caused Nopcsa to criticize the foreign ministry publicly in 1911–1912 and he soon became a thorn in the flesh of ministerial and government circles in Vienna. Despite this, his renown as a specialist on Albania was undiminished and he was even seen at one point as a potential candidate for the Albanian throne in 1913. During the First World War, after his failure as a...